www.liberterra.com

Every month our CEO has a meeting with about 20 associates out of the 6000 total associates in the local region. For the last year every month most if not all of the attendees ask about a telework program. Last week my manager told me that its unlikely to happen any time soon and that although associates keep asking about telework opportunities, they only state the benefit that it provides for the associate, not the company. Now I totally believe that there are benefits, but I read many blogs and articles that state that telework provides X or Y benefit but I rarely come across hard data. Please someone point me to the studies and the hard data that all of this conjecture springs out of. I would really like to put the data in front of the CEO, so that he can no longer rely on the fact that most associates will not put forth the effort to find the ROI in a telework or even a flex schedule could bring about.

(Originally posted as a comment to Tammy Erickson's blog post Do We Need Weekends

Recently there has been an increased interest in teleworking (working from home). This is no doubt because of the increase in gas costs. Most everyone's fuel cost has at least doubled in the last year or so. But, although there is an increase interest from the employee side of things the employer does not always see the benefit except that his employee just doesn't want to drive to work everyday. Well I found these facts about teleworking that should shed some light on the advantage that the employer gets from teleworking.

I found this a while back but forgot about it until today when I was going through my del.icio.us bookmarks.

Well if the subject got you here and you want a way to turn off your wireless card, but your laptop (or desktop) doesn't have a hardware switch to turn it off you can use this software. The rfswitch software lets you turn off your wireless without the need for or even use of a hardware switch.

This is going to be quick and dirty for now, but I wanted to post this information while it is fresh in my mind. If you have a need to use Youtube (http://www.youtube.com) videos on your website or just want to download the videos for later usage you can take advantage of the fact that YouTube has recently created the ability to get MP4 versions (apple quicktime) of their videos with their recent push for higher quality video.

Credit to Google Operating System Blog for turning me onto this idea and a place you should visit if you want an easy way to get google videos (youtube) downloaded straight to your desktop.

If you want to automate the process and you are a linux user then the following information (which is basically a shell script should help you out.

This is still very rough and not meant to be the most efficient way to do this, but it works.


#Step 1
# Youtube URL is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xKGZMwaIG8
# That will take you to the video you want to download.

wget -O mp4.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xKGZMwaIG8

#Step 2
# setup TITLE,VIDEO and YOUTUBE variables

# get the title of the mp4 file
TITLE=`grep "name=\"title\" content=" mp4.html | cut -f4 -d"\""`

#set the video_id string
VIDEO=`grep fullscreen mp4.html | cut -d"&" -f3,7`

#set the youtube part of the URL
YOUTUBE="http://www.youtube.com/get_video?fmt=18&"

#Step 3
# get the youtube video as an mp4
wget -O "${TITLE}.mp4" ${YOUTUBE}${VIDEO}

# Your video is now in the $TITLE.mp4 so if you video's title
# is "Ayn Rand" then the filename would be "Ayn Rand.mp4".

Thats it for now.

As a supporter and user of Firefox, its awesome to see that more than eight million people downloaded Firefox 3. It will take a couple of weeks to determine if the Guinness world record for most downloads in a single day has been achieved but with eight million downloads it looks like it is in the bag.